Did you know that the great Charles Mingus also developed a process for training cats to use human toilets?

A new ebook has been posted at Lamination Colony: Georgic, With Eclogues for Interrogators by Mark Cunningham, available in HTML and PDF. Please enjoy.

– I never read philosophy.
– Why not?
– I don’t understand it. […]
– Why did you write your books?
– I don’t know. I’m not an intellectual. I just feel things. I invented Molloy and the rest on the day I understood how stupid I’d been. I began then to write down the things I feel.

– Beckett

[Thanks Jon Cone]

The Outsider Writers Collective has an open call for a fiction chapbook contest. They’re looking for around 14k – 20k words and it doesn’t look like there is a fee. What they want: Prose. Give us a story collection, or give us something altogether unique. We are open to plays on form and structure. Our editorial tastes lean toward the character-driven, quirky, perhaps even dark fiction.

Submit by December 31. More info here.

Just saw that I. Fontana has a short piece in the new online issue of PANK.  (So does HTMLGiant regular Reynard Seifert–nice.)  Last month I loved Fontana’s much longer story “What the Matter Is” on Spork.

A story about people willing to be blown up to sell a book.

Please welcome three new Giants to the fold: Brian Foley (who made his guest-posted debut below, and more forthcoming); Alexis Orgera (author of Illuminatrix and all around rad woman); and Nathaniel Otting (proprietor of Schoen Books, publisher, translator, and much more). We’re thinking they’re going to help us squawk more about poetics, translation, language, and a whole lot of else.

Derek White is selling some amazing rubbings/collages he made while in Rome, herein administered among ruminations on the city and Thomas Pynchon’s V..

Kassia Kroser spits some logic about the frenzy for “what’s next?! what’s new?!”): ‘The Unicorn Will Not Save Publishing‘ @ Booksquare. The solution? “Saving publishing is the job of publishers. No one thing will save publishing. Lots of little things will save publishing.” [Thanks Matt Bell.]

Nick Ripatrazone brings an in-depth and very excellent close reading and analysis of William Gass’s “The Pedersen Kid” at Quarterly Conversation: “The word snow—and its variations—appears 181 times within the 79 pages of “The Pedersen Kid.” The repetition transfers snow from word to thing: snow is overwhelming and smothering, equal parts plot, character, and theme. The word appears in the second sentence, and it completes the initial thought of the story. It is a Faulknerian convention, a trope in the tradition of adventure novels. Snow is omniscient but transient, gone come spring.”